Scenes From the Picket Lines

By JOHN GRAVOIS

Teaching assistants' unions lost a major legal battle, but they
are still fighting

By now it seems written into the academic calendar: With spring
come the police barriers, the bullhorns, and the sandwich boards.
Every April campus labor activists across the country head outside.
Strikes, teach-ins, and rallies bloom like daffodils.

But not every spring is the same.

For graduate-student labor activists, the past five years have
seen historic gains -- and a sudden